A framework for sustainable communities

Community driven startups

The most effective agile product teams are groups of friends. A company that serves a community will design and build features that the community needs at a very fast pace and will be able to adapt to any economic environment.

The framework is designed with input from experts in their different fields who have come together to design the ideal roadmap for a startup, one that is able to engage their community and treat its collaborators as valuable humans.

A startup is a good business model that finds way to deliver high returns, can raise a lot of money, and quickly grow in revenue. A similar model can be applied in other collaborative work environments, including non profits. Financial and legal responsibility are important to protect the integrity of the working relation.

Justification

A community startup has elements of its community in all departments, it must embody trust and support for its employees and members, the force of the startup then comes from the community much more so than anything the startup can build itself.

The community for the startup can exists before any code is written, like Product Hunt that launched as a newsletter, and it lives beyond the technical features like Reddit AFK meetups.

The goal of our startups is to connect some kind of people to another and in some instances charge a fee for facilitating that connection. The day that we do that really well investors and paid users will come after us. “Follow excellence and success will chase you” — Ranchoddas Shamaldas Chanchad.

User interviews reveal that users are eager to collaborate and feel supported by the thought of the community. The investors are looking for good deals and overlooked opportunities. Investors, founders and operators know that communities are powerful.

Launching the community earlier and allowing members to communicate, and having channels of communication with them can help us reach our internal goals faster, bring awareness to what we’re doing, support other founders in our community, organically lead to new startups and teams being born, lead us to great talent, and create an audience for our paid interactions.

A community driven development approach involves very good communication across departments, it needs clear guidelines and culture, and it comes with challenges. It requires highly motivated individuals that can pick up on new skills at will, and it rewards them with unique challenges.